Towns

Dr. Belinda Straight, Civil Rights Activist

Dr. Belinda Crompton Straight, 95, a longtime summer resident of Chilmark, died Dec. 5 at her assisted living home in Chevy Chase, Md. The cause was pneumonia. She also had dementia.

From the 1940s until 2007, Dr. Straight visited the Vineyard almost every summer. After renting several different properties in Chilmark and Menemsha in the 1950s, she and her husband Michael Whitney Straight knew they wanted to own property and build a house in Chilmark. They bought land overlooking Quitsa Pond, and helped with the design and building of the house which was completed in 1963. In summers, the house was almost always filled with their children and other relatives and friends. Following her divorce from Michael Straight in 1969, Dr. Straight rented other Chilmark houses for summer vacations, and for a few years in the 1980s she owned a house near the town landing on Quitsa Pond.

Beginning in the 1950s, Chilmark became the place for Dr. Straight’s special friendships. Her close friends included Roger and Evelyn Baldwin, Gilbert and Nancy Harrison, Stan and Polly Murphy, Milton and Virginia Mazer, Louise Bowie Graves, Helen Manning and Trudy Taylor, to name a few.

She was a prominent psychiatrist in the Washington, D.C., area from 1952 until her retirement in 2007 at age 87.

She served on a small team of physicians who traveled to Selma, Ala., in 1965 to provide emergency first aid and triage to civil rights marchers. Six hundred marchers were preparing to walk from Selma to Montgomery to support voting rights for blacks and to protest the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a local civil right leader who had been murdered by an Alabama state trooper. The first Selma march was held on March 7, which became known as Bloody Sunday, when police used billy clubs and tear gas to attack and injure scores of marchers.

The (Washington) Evening Star of March 12, 1965, reported that Dr. Straight said the medical team was ready with four ambulances including two hearses on March 7. “We made splints out of rolled-up newspapers. We sent boys to different homes to get sheets for slings and converted a minister’s house into a first aid station. Children brought blankets to put on the floor, since we had only one table,” she told the newspaper.

In an article in the April 9, 1965, Vineyard Gazette, Dr. Straight described what she saw and did on Bloody Sunday. “The injured began to pour into the kitchen. The little house rocked with cries of anguish. Stumbling, limping, bleeding, retching — more and more staggered in. Some were blinded, others could scarcely breathe, some in terror did not know who or where they were. Over the choking fumes rose the sobs and cries of horror of the relatives,” she told the Gazette.

One of the injured marchers Dr. Straight assisted was John Lewis, who had a fractured skull. At the time, as chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, he was a principal organizer of the Selma marches. Later as a congressman from Georgia, he met Dr. Straight in his Washington office in 2007 for the first time since she treated him in 1965.

Dr. Straight and the medical team were prepared for more violence during the second Selma march on Tuesday March 9, 1965. John Lewis left the hospital and joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in marching across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma with several thousand supporters. Among the marchers that day was Dr. Straight’s 78-year-old mother, Lillian Tobey, who was the widow of U.S. Sen. Charles Tobey. Mrs. Tobey went to Selma to march alongside former Congresswoman Emily Douglas (wife of U.S. Senator Paul H. Douglas) and Jane Ickes (widow of Interior Secretary and New Deal architect Harold Ickes). That march ended after organizers voluntarily turned the marchers around after crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge. Dr. Straight returned to Washington, D.C., after the second march. The third march started in Selma on March 12 and ended when marchers reached Montgomery on March 24, escorted by U.S. Army soldiers and federalized Alabama National Guardsmen.

Dr. Straight was born Belinda Booth Crompton in Port Chester, N.Y. in 1920. She married Michael Whitney Straight in 1939. She attended Vassar College and George Washington University. After having four children, she received her M.D. from New York University in 1952, at a time when there were few women physicians.

Dr. Straight had numerous clinical and academic appointments, and from 1960 until 2007 she had a private practice specializing in child and adult psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. During that time, she became a nationally-recognized expert in therapy for child and adult sex abuse victims.

For the past five years she lived at Brighton Gardens of Friendship Heights, an assisted living community in Chevy Chase, Md.

She is survived by her five children, David Straight of Knoxville, Tenn., Michael Straight and his wife Audrey Straight of Rockville, Md., Susan Straight of Trumansburg, N.Y. and Chilmark, Dinah Straight Krosnick of New York city and her husband Joel Krosnick, and Dorothy Elmhirst Straight of Newbury; and by four grandchildren, Noah Rindos, Willow Rindos, Gwendolyn Krosnick and Joshua Krosnick; two step-grandchildren, Jessica Miller of West Tisbury and David Burt of Dover and West Tisbury; and four step great-grandchildren, Marissa D’Antonio of West Tisbury, Isis Burt of West Tisbury and Aurora and Graydon Burt of Dover and West Tisbury.

Comments (3)

Susan Straight, Chilmark

My mother was an extraordinary woman who led a long rich life spanning almost a century. She was born three days before women got the right to vote and died shortly before we may have a woman president.
Among her many achievements was starting a department of psychiatry at Children's Hospital in Washington D.C. where she was on the staff for many years.
She was a groundbreaker with a wonderful and feisty spirit. We will miss her greatly.

Beilinda Straight, "Binny", was elected my godmother, when such familial niceties were still in fashion in the early sixties. I didn't know about feminism as I was finding my feet as a toddler, but over decades I received an education from Binny, and from her friend Louise, and from my sister Sally.
As the long-standing member of a cadre of irreverent and insistent women, Belinda was fiercely courageous and kind. I hope I can convey some of her story to my children. It really matters.
W. Graves

Binny was our mother's best friend. But then I'm guessing that many people would say that. They met at Vassar, dated and married men who were friends, lived near each other in Northern Virginia and had 5 matched pairs of children until our mother bested Binny by having a 6th (second marriage) - my brother Will, Binny's godchild. Binny was always an idol for me - smart as a whip and also gorgeous, ribald, racy and funny. She had a great sense of personal style and a large, compassionate and encompassing heart. I was lucky enough to have one last visit with her less than a year ago. She will live vibrantly in my memory.